Dentmed goes international

Karolinska Institutet is ranked as one of the world's top universities for the subject dental and now the Department of Dental Medicine starts cooperation with several other leading universities in the world. As a part of this internationalization project the institution, holds a research retreat with keynote speakers from Hong Kong.

The department's internationalization project aims at strengthening KI's brand in the international research context and to get more resources for dental research. The work started with identifying a number of interesting educational institutions to initiate collaborations with. The goal is to by the end of 2018 have started at least one project with each of these institutions.

Hong Kong has has one of the world's best educations in dentistry. The Department of Dental Medicine at Karolinska has started a collaboration with the University of Hong Kong. Foto: Hong Kong at night by Daxis (CC BY-ND 2.0)

The internationalization group takes the lead

The directorate of the department has established an internationalization group. It consists of Göran Dahllöf, professor and head of section, who is appointed "head of international affairs", Malin Ernberg, professor and head of research at the department, Margaret Sällberg Chen, senior lecturer and director of studies for doctoral education at the department, and Karin Garming-Legert, lecturer and program director at the dental program.

Asian universities highly interesting

The Internationalization group's first network trip went in the spring of 2016 to Asia, where they visited The University of Hong Kong, Taipei Medical University and National Dental Centre of Singapore and National University of Singapore. A given activity during the visits was to present the different research areas in which the Department of Dental Medicine operates.

– Wherever we went the response was great. All institutions were very interested in collaborations and we have already written memorandum of understanding, which is a kind of an agreement of collaboration, with several of them. And in March we are holding a research retreat with keynote speakers from Hong Kong. Now it remains to see which exciting research projects that can take shape, says Göran Dahllöf.

But this is only the beginning. During 2017 Dahllöf and his colleagues turn towards the West to expand the number of partnerships further.

KI an attractive collaboration partner

The Department of Dental Medicine is an attractive partner for other top universities. That became clear especially after the two QS rankings of the subject of dentistry. Last year, in 2015, Karolinska Institutet was appointed as the best university in the subject dentistry. This year the top ranking was confirmed when the KI was ranked third best.